Gabe Newell Interview on Seven Day Cooldown

Nachiketh

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Posts: 3,748

#1 Posted 20 April 2012 - 05:44 PM

There's an interesting upcoming Podcast conducted by Seven Day Cooldown where Valve CEO Gabe Newell was interviewed. He spoke about DOTA 2 having an alternate "Free to Play" system which will be a little more considerate towards the more encouraging and helpful community members who play the game. Below is an excerpt from the Podcast.

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"It's going to be free-to-play -- it'll have some twists, but that's the easiest way for people to think about it," Newell said.

"The issue that we're struggling with quite a bit is something I've kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people's contributions to a community?

"We're trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated. We all know people where if they're playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they're playing we would [rather] be on the other side of the planet.

"It's just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people."

Thanks to The verge for the headsup.

Back to top of the page up there ^
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Humbug

Gordon Freeman's Personal Aid

Posts: 3,270

#2 Posted 21 April 2012 - 08:12 AM

Cool, thanks. It's a long listen, so I just put it onto my laptop and listened when I was in bed.

There's this hilarious part around the 21min mark where the interviewers cleverly use richochet 2 as a code word to ask Gabe about the next Half Life and they manage to get him to confirm that there is active development. Goes something like this- not exact words just a summary

Interviewer: The question on the back of your fans minds, what we have been waiting to ask you a long time, when can we expect the release of Ricochet 2.
Gabe: As we are thinking thru the giant story arc that is Ricochet 2 we would like to be transparent about Ricochet 2 but we won't until we are sure that there won't be any more twists and turns internally which would drive our fans crazy
Interviewer: With Ricochet 2 have you had people moving off that project which has slowed down the development cycle
Gabe: No! Everybody who was working on Ricochet 2 continues to work on Ricochet 2!

Apart from that Gabe does comment that they have talked internally about how to eventually bring back Adrian Shepard into the loop and they have certainly not forgotten him.

Gabe says that Valve is a very different company to apple in that they believe in more open platforms and want their partners to do well, whereas Apple is very good at driving their partner margins down to almost zero. Apparently Gabe personally is spending his work time doing Linux stuff these days...